IBM (IBM  ), the International Business Machines Corporation, is getting a new CEO. Chairman, president, and CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty will officially step down April 6, 2020 after four total decades at IBM. Her plan is to retire at the end of 2020.

After starting as a systems analyst and systems engineer, she later headed sales, marketing, and strategy. She stepped in as president and CEO on January 1, 2012 as the company's first female CEO.

Prior to Rometty, Samuel Palmisano had been CEO for 10 years. The same year he started, in 2002, IBM acquired PricewaterhouseCoopers, the IT and accounting consulting firm. Rometty successfully led the integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers during that time, even having helped negotiate the purchase.

Another one of Rometty's noteworthy accomplishments for IBM was overseeing the company's acquisition of Red Hat, a technology company which is known for its "hybrid multicloud environments." IBM's Red Hat acquisition, which started in October 2018 and was finalized in July 2019, was for $34 billion.

The acquisition of Red Hat means that IBM is set up to become a strong competitor of Amazon (AMZN  ) and Microsoft (MSFT  ) when it comes to cloud computing, according to Forbes.

Rometty's tenure at IBM has clearly been long, successful, and impactful. That said, during the eight years that she was CEO, IBM's stock fell more than 25%.

The company's current market capitalization is valued at $135.95 billion.

Rometty will be succeeded by Arvind Krishna, who will become IBM's 10th chief executive officer. Rometty has high hopes for Krishna's abilities and cited his impressive track record in a release, referring to him as a "brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain."

IBM was originally founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and in 1924 was renamed.